Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711

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Wear
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wear

Automatic classification of severe and mild wear in worn surface images T

using histograms of oriented gradients as descriptor
⁎
C. Gonzalez-Ariasa, C.C. Viafaraa, , J.J. Coronadob, F. Martinezc
a
Corrosion Research Group, Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science School, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Cra. 27-Cl. 9, Bucaramanga, Colombia
b
Research Group of Fatigue and Surfaces, Mechanical Engineering School, Universidad del Valle, Cl. 13 #100-00, Cali, Colombia
c
Biomedical Imaging, Vision and Learning Laboratory (BIVL2ab), Systems and Computing Engineering School, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Cra. 27-Cl. 9,
Bucaramanga, Colombia

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The main objective of this work was to develop a novel computational strategy that is able to predict wear
Wear monitoring regime operation in worn surfaces. The image data were taken from worn surfaces images of cast iron specimens
Image processing techniques subjected to abrasion wear tests. These images were classified into two groups, identified with the severe and
HOG descriptor mild labels, according to the wear rate results found during the wear tests. The surface features of worn surfaces
Abrasive wear regimes
images were coded as a dense Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor and thus classifier models were
Mild wear
Severe wear
herein implemented to obtain a learning model of wear severity. Gaussian Naive Bayes, Decision Tree and
Random Forest were the classifier models used, which span the family of classifiers from fast to robust im-
plementations. An evaluation of the classifier capacity to identify those images corresponding to the severe and
mild wear regimes was made by following a k-fold cross validation strategy. The qualitative characterization of
worn surfaces images through the HOG computation and the application of classifier models allow predicting
well whether a mild or a severe abrasive wear regimes operated. The proposed approach achieves more than
80% of accuracy in almost all HOG configuration and for the different classifiers herein evaluated.

1. Introduction inspectors [4–8]. The condition monitoring is usually made by ac-

Wear problems in industry applications involve not only mass losses
of mating surfaces but also time, energy and material losses, which
result in high economical costs of the corresponding maintenance and
reparation activities [1]. For this reason, there is a demand for an im-
proved reliability of systems in order to reduce shut-down and un-
availability of machine components [2]. An optimized reliability of
machine elements could help in preventing failures by means of esti-
mation of the useful life and the probability of failure. From this point
of view, wear inspection is a fundamental issue to be developed and
implemented in engineering applications, also incorporating smart
systems technology [3].
The wear condition monitoring through the image processing
techniques has been extensively investigated considering its many ad-
vantages [4–21]. This vision-based monitoring can be automated and
allows obtaining an online, non-contact, accurate and cost-effective
inspection of worn surfaces [4]. Additionally, it is widely accepted that
imaging systems are promising to support and even replace human
quiring images from worn surfaces or from wear debris surfaces. Then,
these images are analyzed for extracting the surface characteristics
using a broad range of image processing techniques. Some of the most
common image processing techniques which have been generally ap-
plied for monitoring wear involve thresholding [5–12], edge detection
or operators estimation [5,6,9,8,11,14–16], fractal analysis [4,16–18]
and stitching [12,19–21].
Thresholding consists on group similar pixels by establishing dif-
ferent threshold levels, and associating such groups to different classes
[22]. This is the main processing technique used for image segmenta-
tion, for instance, for partitioning worn and unworn regions of a sur-
face, as well as for determining the geometrical profile of a surface. This
explains why thresholding has been commonly used during the condi-
tion monitoring of cutting tools [5,7–10], where the flank and crater
wear must be differentiated from the unworn surface of tool. Moreover,
thresholding is used as an image pre-processing technique for reducing
noise [6]. This strategy is however sensible to color changes, perspec-
tive of capture and illumination variations.

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: camilo.g.ct@gmail.com (C. Gonzalez-Arias), cviafara@saber.uis.edu.co (C.C. Viafara), John.coronado@correounivalle.edu.co (J.J. Coronado),
famarcar@saber.uis.edu.co (F. Martinez).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wear.2018.11.028
Received 4 September 2018; Received in revised form 15 November 2018; Accepted 27 November 2018
0043-1648/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
C. Gonzalez-Arias et al. Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711

The edge detection technique is able to recognize edges in an image Table 1

by estimating operators such as gradients and directions [22] or tex- Description and hardness of the sample materials [25].
ture-based operators [8]. The selection of the operator defines the Symbol Sample materials Bulk hardness
computational cost of the image-based technique. More robust opera-
tors could still be employed for image segmentation [8]. In a worn [HV98N ] [MPa]
surface the quantity of detected edges can be correlated with the wear *
Wa WCI with austenitic matrix 694 ± 16 3670 ± 85
intensity [6,8,11], while in wear debris this technique can identify Wm WCI with martensitic matrix 777 ± 14 4109 ± 74
many geometrical parameters [14]. A main limitation of edge-based W14 WCI with 13.8 wt% Cr 966 ± 30 5108 ± 159
characterization is that much of the times also recovers noise gradients W24 WCI with 24.4 wt% Cr 1062 ± 27 5616 ± 143
that could represent statistical significance, leading to errors in re- M MCI* 493 ± 8 2607 ± 42

presentation.
Fractal image analysis has been also used in different approaches for
monitoring wear surfaces, since it carries out a numerical character-
ization of the surface morphology [16–18]. Fractal characterization
usually assigns numerical values to heterogeneous surfaces which have
been controlled by chaotic processes such as wear [17]. As a result,
some works using this technique have been found correlations between
fractal values and the erosion wear mechanisms [16–18]. Also, the
fractal analysis overcomes problems of local noisy by computing dif-
ferent scales of images, preserving main information along the scales.
For in situ detecting the evolution of a wear process, the stitching is
the most commonly used image-based technique. This technique com-
bines and matches images of a surface obtained in different periods of
time and then detects the topographical changes occurred [21,12]. It
has been employed in the characterization of wear mechanisms in
sliding wear [19,20] and in rolling-sliding contact tests [21,12].
As mentioned above, wear monitoring using image-based techni-
ques have been applied with different kind of analysis, such as cutting
tool wear detection [5–10], wear particles [13,14,16] and laboratory
wear tests characterization [4,11,12,15,17–21]. Some works found that
wear progress of analyzed surfaces can be identified by using the image
processing tools [10,7,14–16]. In particular, Pedersen reported that a
three-stage wear pattern was possible to be recognized during the
cutting tool wear monitoring [7]. Moreover, those studies analyzing
worn surfaces images reported, for the most part and including the
studies of tool wear monitoring, a quantitative correlation between the
wear behavior and the numerical parameters obtained from the pro-
cessed images [6,10,7,8,17,19,4,11,18,20,15]. On the other hand, a few
works only obtained a qualitative correlation between the image ana-
lysis results and the features of worn surfaces [4,21]. In spite of the few
works executing a qualitative characterization of worn surfaces, this
kind of analysis could still contribute for monitoring the wear regimes
operation.
An operation of severe and mild wear regimes has been observed
and characterized during the sliding [23] and the abrasive wear of iron
alloys [24,25]. Each wear regime produces well-distinguished features
in worn surfaces, wear debris and obviously in wear rates. The most
important fact is that the differences in wear rates between both wear
regimes are from one to three orders of magnitude [23,25]. Ad-
ditionally, a transition between severe and mild regimes can be pro-
moted by small changes in the operational conditions of the tribological
system [23–25]. In the case of sliding wear of steels, a slight variation of
normal load, sliding velocity or hardness of both sliding bodies could
promote the wear regime transition [23]. For the abrasive wear, a
transition from mild to severe is caused when the material hardness-to-
abrasive hardness ratio (HA/ H ) overcomes a specific value [24,25].
Considering that some changes in operational conditions can be found
in industrial systems [26] and from the viewpoint of machine reliability
[2], it is of crucial importance to inhibit a wear regime transition from
mild to severe. In other words, and in terms of industrial applications,
an operation of a severe wear regime must be strongly prevented.
To the best of our knowledge, an image analysis technique still has
not been applied for recognition of severe and mild wear regimes. Then,
a condition monitoring by using image processing methods could pro-
vide an appropriate tool to detect and diagnostic the wear regimes
operation only by an automated recognition of worn surfaces images.
* WCI: White Cast Iron, MCI: Mottled Cast Iron.
The aim of this work was to develop a computational tool for image
analysis and understanding of worn surfaces exhibiting severe and mild
abrasive wear. For this, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images of
worn surfaces obtained by laboratory abrasion tests published else-
where [25] were analyzed using a Histogram of Oriented Gradients
(HOG) descriptor, together with different image classifier models, ty-
pically used in machine learning applications. An evaluation of the
classification rate for each model was carried out by applying a cross
validation strategy.
2. Experimental procedure
2.1. Selection and classification of images
The selected images for analysis in this work were obtained from an
investigation about the effect of the hardness of abrasive particles on
the mild-severe wear regime transition of cast irons [25]. Abrasive wear
tests were carried out varying both the hardness of the sample materials
(H) and of the abrasive particles (HA ). Detailed information of the wear
tests and the tested materials can be found elsewhere [25]. In Tables 1
and 2 are showed the description and hardness of the sample materials
and of the abrasive particles, respectively.
During the abrasion tests the sample materials were rubbed against
each one of the abrasive particles, from which several hardness ratios
(HA/ H ) were obtained. The wear rate as a function of the hardness ratio
can be observed in Fig. 1, as usually made in the literature [1]. In this
graph two main regions were distinguished corresponding to the mild
and severe wear regimes. In the mild wear regime, low values of wear
rate were produced when the HA/ H ratio was below 1.9 [25]. It must be
noted that in the mild wear region, a higher wear rate was achieved
with increasing the HA/ H ratio. However, those highest values of wear
rate in the mild wear region were still considered as representing a low
wear rate. At values of the HA/ H ratio higher than 1.9, a region of
severe wear regime was obtained. In this region, an approximately
constant wear rate was observed for all conditions.
In Fig. 2 the same wear rate data are represented in terms of the
power dissipated by friction. It can be noted that the same two regions
of mild and severe wear are distinguished at the low and high values of
friction power, respectively. Similar results have been obtained in the
mapping of rail wear regimes and transitions [27]. In the present case,
the changes in contact conditions through the increase of the hardness
of the abrasive particle lead to a higher dissipation of energy for time
Table 2
Description and hardness of the abrasive particles [25].
Abrasive particles Hardness
[HV0.98N ] [MPa]
Glass 552 ± 26 2920 ± 138
Garnet 1453 ± 85 7687 ± 450
2563 ± 124 13559 ± 656
Al2 O3
SiC 3487 ± 322 18447 ± 1703

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C. Gonzalez-Arias et al.
Fig. 1. Wear rate of sample materials as a function of the hardness ratio (HA/ H )
[25].
Fig. 2. Wear rate of sample materials as a function of the power dissipated by
friction.
unit and then to the action of a severe wear regime. This constitute
other approach used in literature to classify types of wear regimes. Both
approaches give a basis to classify the SEM images of worn surfaces.
A total of 50 SEM images of worn surfaces of six of the hardness
ratios were selected, classified and labeled in according to the two wear
regimes. 29 images corresponded to the test conditions exhibiting se-
vere wear and 21 images were associated to the test conditions in which
the mild wear occurred. The images consisted in a 256 × 256 pixels
array, with a range from 0 to 255 in grey level and giving 3D data of the
surface texture. In Fig. 3 the SEM images corresponding to some of the
test conditions are showed, where the main differences between surface
features produced in both wear regimes can be recognized. Mild wear
promoted worn surfaces with a smooth appearance and low amount of
shallow scratches, meanwhile worn surfaces with severe wear had a
rougher surface with plastic deformation traces, microchips formation
and deeper scratches [25]. Wear patterns observed in SEM images have
already been characterized with a vision-based tool [17].
2.2. Geometrical image descriptor: the histogram of oriented gradient
(HOG) approach
Wear severity of surfaces can be associated with non-uniform gra-
dient patterns in captured images (see SEM image examples in Fig. 2).
Nevertheless, SEM images with associated mild and severe wear fea-
tures report a huge variety of gradient patterns along the surface. For
instance, in Fig. 2, the three examples of severe wear conditions
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Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711
describe different texture patterns. Then, a computational description
and an automatic classification of wear regimes is very challenging
from traditional global representation of gradients, color-based de-
scriptors or strategies that try to recover specific shapes from surfaces.
For example, the computation of global approaches that quantify gra-
dients in whole images lost local description that could be fundamental
to understand the severity degree. Also, the approaches that only use
the norm of gradient as surface signature are prone to errors because
the diverse textures associated to the same degree of wear severity. In
this work, a local gradient quantification is carried out by computing a
set of oriented histograms along the images, allowing a local descrip-
tion of surfaces. Also, the HOG descriptor achieves a dense and re-
dundant estimation of gradient histograms, which are computed fol-
lowing a sliding window. To remove point gradient artifacts, the
histograms are normalized with respect to a neighborhood. The histo-
gram of gradients gives an idea of main orientations reported into a
specific region, while the dense computation along the image emerge to
be robust with respect to the variability of representation of surface
features of wear regimes. Hence, such sophisticated gradient descrip-
tion allows to robustly train learning strategies models that achieve a
proper discrimination between mild and severe wear classes.
Specifically, the dense HOG computation starts by dividing an
image into a set of patches with horizontal and vertical lengths of size
c = ch × c v , respectively. Then a local histogram of gradients Hi is
computed to represent each of these ci patches. For a specific region c ,
with gradients ▽c , and respective orientations: ϕ (▽c) , the HOG de-
scriptor computes gradient orientation bins ω as the relative occurrence
of gradient vectors with a given orientation, weighted by their vector
norm:
Hi (ω) = ∑ ▽c
{ϕ (▽c) = ω} (1)
where ω ∈ {ω0…ωN − 1} and ωN is the number of orientations. Each of the
computed bins ω are normalized w.r.t to the sum of the total of norm
gradients on the specific region c . In this case, a smooth surface with
mild wear could be represented as an uniform histogram with equal
probability for all gradient orientations. In contrast, local c i patches
that capture surface features of severe wear are represented by asym-
metric histograms with gradient bins that stand out from the others and
depict the non-uniformity of the surface. Nevertheless, the observed
wear regimes report high variability on gradient patterns, being a very
challenging problem (see Fig. 3). For instance, in Fig. 3 (b) there are
some uniform global gradient patterns but with a main direction on
local histograms. Finally, a regional analysis of a set of neighborhood Ω
patches could be achieved by concatenating the respective neighbor-
hood histograms bn = {H1, H2, …Hz ; Hi ∈ Ω} and performing a block
normalization with respect to the total number of bins of whole histo-
bn
grams in a specific region, as shown in: bn = .
bn +ε
The whole HOG configuration is illustrated in Fig. 4. From now on
the notation of p-cq-br will be taken to express a HOG configuration of p
orientations, q patch sizes and r grouped patches in the normalized
block. The number of orientations, the patch size and the number of
grouped patches to be normalized constitute the main parameters of
HOG descriptor to capture wear patterns in SEM surface images.
A proper trade-off of such parameters can describe main geome-
trical wear shapes within a reasonable computational time to obtain a
prediction about a particular surface. For instance, a small size patch
requires few bins in the respective histograms, allowing to describe
atomic patterns but being sensible to illumination changes and common
image variations. In such case, it is recommendable to make stable the
gradient description by grouping a lot of patches and using a same
normalization. On the other hand, large size patches can include dif-
ferent gradient wear patterns and histograms with more bins are re-
quired. In this work, the best parameters were found experimentally but
in general the proposed approach is relatively stable with different
C. Gonzalez-Arias et al.
Fig. 3. SEM images of the worn surfaces for the W14-glass (a), Wa-glass (b), W24-garnet (c), M-SiC (d), M-garnet (e) and Wm-garnet (f) conditions. Note that images
(b) and (f) are quite similar in terms of the gradient patterns, which difficult automatic representation and classification tasks. Also, these group of images evidence
the high variability of wear regimes features.
parameter configurations. This HOG descriptor has been successfully
used in many context and applications of computer vision, such as
object detection, person recognition, among much others. Essentially,
this descriptor is able to robustly describe any geometrical configura-
tion by using occurrence statistics of the gradients in local regions. The
local description of gradient histograms and the block regional nor-
malization achieve a dense global description of patterns that are pre-
sent in a particular image.
In our particular case, the wear severity can be successfully de-
scribed by using the HOG descriptor, since the “abnormal” severe
patterns are stand out in non-uniform histograms captured along the
sequence. Other similar approaches has been proposed in this direction
like the edge orientation histograms, scale-invariant feature transform
descriptors, and shape contexts, but differ in how geometrical config-
urations are captured and the number of measures of histograms ob-
tained in an image [28]. In this exploratory work we decide to locally
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Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711
describe regions with HOG because its simplicity allows to understand
the computed patterns from recovered shapes.
2.3. Wear image classification
An automatic classification step was herein implemented to auto-
matically label each image according to the wear severity. This classi-
fication task comprises the automatic labeling of two different classes of
wear regime, severe and mild, expressed as y = {0, 1} , respectively. For
so doing, each image is represented with a HOG descriptor vector as
x = {x1, x2 , …x n} , where each x i is a resultant bin feature of the de-
scriptor. Then a set of m training image descriptors x1, x2, …xm are used
to build a training model that allows to establish boundaries between
the two categories with some marginal error. The classification task for
a particular sample can be modelled as the probability of belong to a
class yi given a particular HOG descriptor. In such case, the new sample
C. Gonzalez-Arias et al.
Fig. 4. An illustrative example of the HOG descriptor computation over a SEM
image is shown. Each region of the grid is the computed patch with size ch × c v .
At each of these patches is computed an oriented histogram. As illustrated in the
image, in mild wear regions the corresponding histogram is uniform with low
magnitude in each of the bins. In contrast, for severe wear regions non-uniform
histograms are computed. A set of patches bn (red square) are joined together to
carried out a global normalization. Finally, the HOG descriptor corresponds to a
set of whole oriented bins computed along the image (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web ver-
sion of this article.).
to be classified is projected to a trained space and the closest label is
assigned to this sample.
In the literature there are several algorithms to perform such clas-
sification that consider different assumptions to split the space of fea-
tures and establish boundaries among trained classes [29–32]. The ef-
fectiveness of such methodologies depend on size, quality and nature of
the data, which difficult the selection of a proper approach. These al-
gorithms also differ in the computational time which is correlated with
the linearity assumption of data and features used for training. The
wear classification represented from gradient patterns may be highly
variable, and much of the regions can be shared in both severity classes.
In this work we consider three different classifiers that span the family
of classifiers from fast implementations using weak linear assumptions
to more robust classifiers that try to model non-linearities in boundaries
of classification to perform a more sophisticated classification but with
an important increase in computational time. The set of models used in
the comparison are described as follows:
2.3.1. Gaussian naive bayes classifier (Gauss)
This classifier is one of the most simple and fast algorithm to per-
form the classification task under strong (naive) assumption of condi-
tional independence among features of the descriptor {x1, x2 , …x n} [29].
Then, the conditional distribution of a particular label given the HOG
descriptor can be modelled as shown in Eq. (2):
n
P (yk = 0|x1, x2 , …, x n ) ∝ P (yk = 0) ∏ P (xi |yk = 0)
i=1 (2)
where each x i corresponds to a particular bin in the HOG descriptor and
yi is the (mild/severe) label. Also in training model, we assume that
each of the x i features is associated with the particular class yi according
to a Gaussian distribution, as expressed in Eq. (3):
(
P (x i |yi = 0) =  μ xi , σxii ) In general, DT classifier could have low bias and very high variance
(3)
Then, in the training step are build the set normal distributions
 (μ xi , σxii ) for each HOG feature according to each known label. For a
new image represented as a particular HOG descriptor x , each of the
features is projected to the normal trained distribution and a maximum
a posteriori (MAP) rule is implemented to return an automatic label, as
seen in Eq. (4):
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Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711
n
y^ = arg max ∝ P (yk ) ∏ P (xi |yk = 0)
k = {0,1} (4)
i=1
With y^ as the estimated severity label for a new image given the
HOG descriptor. This classifier constitutes a fast and efficient alter-
native to code independently each of the descriptor features. This al-
ternative can easily be extended to real time applications but could be
sensible to image surface variations.
2.3.2. Decision tree classifier (DT)
An additional alternative herein considered was the classification of
wear images but implementing a non parametric computational tree
algorithm [30]. In this case, the conjunction of HOG features
{x1, x2 , …x n} represents the branches of a particular learning tree and the
labels y = {0, 1} are represented in leaves.
In this case, it is assumed that each of the HOG features has a dis-
crete domain and the learning tree is obtained by recursively splitting
the defined domain in a way in which groups are formed with the
closest features. Then, from a set of training HOG descriptors {xj} j1 … m
with the corresponding severity label annotations y = {0, 1} is defined a
set of candidate splits as θ = (j, τm) regarding the HOG feature j and a
particular threshold partition τm . According to the defined maximum
depth of the tree, a set of thresholds τm in each dimension of HOG de-
scriptor are learned to maximize the class discrimination. In this work
was defined a maximum tree depth of two for each dimension, taking
into account the larger dimension of HOG descriptor. The learning al-
gorithm then try to split the space of features in subscapes that contains
patterns of one specific class. At each node Q of the tree is therefore
defined a partition Qleft (θ) and Qright (θ) . From such division, a “Gini
impurity” term IG , is introduced that measure how often a randomly
chosen element on HOG descriptor would be incorrectly labeled at a
specific node G (Q, θ) . During training, the Gini term IG is computed by
summing up the probability of each HOG descriptor pi (with label i)
times the probability of incorrect labels k, being zero when all miss-
clasifications point out to a same label. The expression for Gini term is:
IG = ∑k ≠ i pk (1 − pi ) . Hence, the parameters are selected following a
minimization rule, as defined in Eq. (5):
θ* = arg min G (Q, θ)
θ (5)
Typically, a global optimization process is carried out to set the
corresponding decision tree from training samples. In this work, a
hierarchical optimal discriminant analysis, CART strategy, is carried
out by building binary trees until achieve a stable tree description. This
work implements the algorithm using sklearn library, that consider an
optimized version of the CART strategy. A main advantage of this
classifier is the description of results and the possibility to visually
understand the label decision through the feature branches. However, a
simple tree can be insufficient to learn the whole variability of data and
the prediction can vary according to the number of samples taken to
build the tree.
2.3.3. Random decision forest classifier (RaF)
In this work was also analyzed the performance of automatic wear
prediction by using a set of decision tree classifiers grouped in an en-
semble learning strategy named the random decision forest [31,32].
This classifier overcomes some sensibility problems of decision trees by
computing several trees to take a robust decision.
in results, being strongly dependent of initialization parameters and
features used in the learning process. In random forest strategy, a set of
independent DT algorithms are trained over different parts of HOG
features space to reduce the variability in the prediction. For so doing, a
Bootstrap aggregating strategy is implemented, which consist on select
randomly a set of training HOG features {x1, x2 , …x n} to built a particular
decision tree fb . This process is performed several times to obtain B
C. Gonzalez-Arias et al.
different trees with the capability to perform prediction of severity label
yi from a set of reduced HOG features. In order to preserve computa-
tional efficiency for whole experiments, the proposed strategy was ran
with a total of 10 trees in the forest (B = 10 ). The final prediction may
be carried out by averaging the predictions of individual trees, or taking
the majority vote as expressed in Eq. (6):
B As a consequence of the variation in the HOG parameters of or-
1
y^ = ∑ fb ∧ y^ = arg max {f1 , …fB }
B b=1 (6)
An estimation of uncertainty of the prediction from the family of
computed trees can be also expressed in Eq. (7):
B
∑b = 1 (y^b − μ (y^ ))
σ=
B−1 (7)
This strategy in much of the cases result more accurate to obtain
automatic prediction over a large dataset of training images but with
the limitation of loss interpretability in the obtained results.
2.4. Statistical validation framework
Taking into account that classification task is dependent of number
of training samples, a statistical cross validation strategy was herein
used to analyze the performance of the proposed approach at different
number of samples. Such analysis was extended to observe the perfor-
mance of the HOG descriptor using different configuration, for instance,
the patch size, the number of oriented bins and the number of patches
used to normalize the descriptor. Also, the cross validation was eval-
uated over different implemented classifiers.
The cross validation herein implemented was the k-fold strategy, in
which the whole dataset is split iteratively in two complementary
subsets. At each split one subset is called training set and the other is
named testing set to validate the particular approach. Such partition is
performed in multiple rounds to reduce variability in results and
properly characterize the predictive performance of the model. This
statistical evaluation, among others, allows to identify overfitting in
trained models and analyze the capability of generalization of classifi-
cation strategies. Particularly, for our experiments the whole dataset is
initially randomly shuffled and then partitioned into k equal sub-
samples. Then k − 1 subsets are used to built a training model and the
leftover subset is used for test the strategy. This process is repeated k
times to ensure all possible samples into training and test subsets.
Finally, an average is computed over all k experiments to obtain the
accuracy of the particular approach. In a particular configuration of
k = n , with n the number of total images we obtain a leave-one-out cross-
validation in which the major number of “severe” and “mild” samples
are used to built the training model and only one image is tested at each
round. The performance of the HOG descriptor computation together
with classifier models was evaluated in terms of the classical statistical
accuracy. Let TP , TN , FP and FN be the number of true positive, true
negative, false positive and false negative, respectively, associated to
each mild or severe labels. At each experiment, the annotated labels
could take values of True or False, while the predicted labels could be
positives or negatives. Hence, the accuracy is defined in Eq. (8):
TP + TN
Acc =
TP + TN + FP + FN (8)
3. Results and discussion
3.1. HOG descriptor
The results of the HOG computation with sample images of mild and
severe wear are showed in Fig. 5. This figure presents the images of
worn surfaces with mild (a) and severe (b) wear, together with the
corresponding HOG results with 4 − c16 − b1 (c) and 32 − c 64 − b1 (d)
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Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711
configurations. Initially, it could be noted that the HOG results are more
uniform in the mild wear image than in the severe wear image. This is a
consequence of the few features which are found in the worn surface
with the mild wear. On the contrary, the severe wear image exhibits
more and notable surface features such as edges, which result in a
particular pattern obtained in the respective HOG computation.
ientation and patch size, it can be observed some differences between
the HOG results for both HOG configurations. In the first place, we can
note the higher quantity of small patches in the 4 − c16 − b1 config-
uration, which allows to identify with more detail the surface features
in the image. In other words, and depending on the scale of the wear
characteristics, this HOG parameter must be optimized. On the other
hand, the quantity of HOG orientations does not seem to have a marked
effect. This could be a result of the fact of the worn surfaces have a
strong directional component, since the abrasion wear test establishes a
specific sliding direction. Then, those aligned scratches observed in the
worn surfaces could not be differentiated as the number of orientations
is varied. It must be mentioned that SEM caption is present in all the
images, from which no effect could be expected.
3.2. Cross validation analysis of classifiers
k-fold cross validation was performed over the set of classifiers and
using different HOG configurations. An average of the 50-fold was es-
timated as a function of the parameters configuration, as well as the
maximum value of accuracy. The cross validation results of classifiers in
terms of mean accuracy (%) for the different combinations of HOG
parameters are presented in Fig. 6.
From a general point of view, all the classifiers had an outstanding
behavior since they predict very well the kind of wear exhibited by a
particular image. In other words, they can recognize an image ex-
hibiting mild and severe wear features in an accuracy of approximately
higher than 80%. The RaF classifier result in the most stable values of
accuracy. However, the DT classifier reached higher values close to
95% in some HOG configurations. It must be noted that the DT classifier
displayed an unstable performance due to the high dispersion of ac-
curacy values. The Gauss classifier had a stable behavior but in several
configurations showed low values of accuracy.
The maximum values of accuracy for the same configurations of
HOG parameters are showed in Fig. 7. A very similar behavior was
noted between the maximum and mean values of accuracy. It must be
highlighted that most part of the RaF maximum values are grater than
90%, which gives a reliable result of the classifier capacity. At the same
time, an accuracy of 100% can also be reached with the DT classifier,
taking into account a determined 32 − c 64 − b 42 combination of HOG
parameters.
To better analyze the effect of the number of grouped patches and
the patch size, results of accuracy are presented in Tables 3 and 4, re-
spectively. Mean values, with the associated standard deviations in
parenthesis, and maximum values of accuracy are reported in both
Tables. Initially, in Table 3 are shown the results in accuracy of clas-
sifiers for three HOG configurations varying the number of grouped
patches. There, the best performance of the DT classifier can be ob-
served, which obtained the highest accuracies in both mean and max-
imum values. In fact, for 32 orientations computed in patches with
dimensions of 64 × 64 and using 42 patches for the block normalization
(32 − c 64 − b 42 HOG configuration), a maximum accuracy of 100%
was acquired.
In Table 4 the results obtained for each classifier are summarized,
where the patch size was changed while keeping constant the other
HOG parameters. In general, for Gauss and DT classifiers the increase in
the patch size from 16 to 32 results in an improvement of the de-
scription of gradient patterns, achieving better classification accuracy.
The RaF performance is stable for all the patch size configurations.
The effect of the number of k-folds on the accuracy values for the
C. Gonzalez-Arias et al. Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711

Fig. 5. HOG results for the images of worn surfaces with mild and severe wear and different configurations.

Fig. 6. Results of mean values in accuracy of classifiers for different HOG parameters configurations.

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Fig. 7. Results of maximum values in accuracy of classifiers for different HOG parameters configurations.

Table 3 were observed. For instance, the lower patch size results in lower values
Results of accuracy (%) for the classifiers with different HOG orientations. of accuracy and changed the best classifier model, from DT to RaF. In
Classifier % of accuracy with different HOG orientations
addition, the decrease in the patch size also moved the maximum values
of accuracy to higher numbers of k-fold for Gauss and RaF classifiers.
Config 8-c64-b4 16-c64-b4 32-c64-b4 From this viewpoint, smaller patch size contributes to acquire more
precise and higher values of accuracy and to have maximum values of
Mean Max. Mean Max. Mean Max.
accuracy at low numbers of k-fold. In other words, an image analysis of
Gauss 0.88 , (0.22 ) 0.90 0.87 , (0.23 ) 0.90 0.86 , (0.23 ) 0.91 smaller regions makes possible to use few images to build the training
RaF 0.85 , (0.23 ) 0.92 0.85 (0.24 ) 0.92 0.86 , (0.23 ) 0.94 model of each classifier and thus the computational cost of analysis is
DT 0.91, (0.18 ) 0.97 0.94 (0.15) 0.98 0.96 , (0.13 ) 1 reduced.
Some limitations are reported for the proposed work, when image
samples of different classes report gradient patterns very similar (see
Table 4
Fig. 2, examples (b) and (f)). In such cases, the configuration of HOG
Results of accuracy (%) for the classifiers with different HOG patch sizes.
descriptor with few orientations, i.e., {8, 16} , produce a miss-classifi-
Classifier % of accuracy with different HOG patch sizes cation. This fact is associated to the poor representation of orientations
that only recovers strong directions of gradients. Interestingly enough,
Config 16-c16-b4 16-c32-b4 16-c64-b4
for HOG configuration with histograms of 64 bin orientations and patch
Mean Max. Mean Max. Mean Max. size of c = 64 , the proposed strategy achieves a proper classification for
these kind of examples, using the DT and RaF algorithms. The addi-
Gauss 0.67 , (0.32 ) 0.71 0.87 , (0.23 ) 0.91 0.87 , (0.23 ) 0.90 tional direction on histograms allows to enrich the representation of
RaF 0.85 , (0.24 ) 0.95 0.87 , (0.23 ) 0.96 0.85 , (0.24 ) 0.92
surfaces and differentiate very local patterns in regions. Also the block
DT 0.72 , (0.29 ) 0.82 0.83 , (0.25 ) 0.90 0.94 , (0.15 ) 0.98
normalization contributes to a smoothing of small bins that much of the
time represent noise on images. In such configuration, for some ex-
three classifier models in determined HOG configurations is displayed periments, the proposed approach achieves a perfect classification,
in Fig. 8, where in addition the error bars and the maximum values of demonstrating the robustness of descriptor to represent wear regimes.
accuracy (vertical) for each classifier are shown. In the 16-c64-b42
configuration it can be observed that all the classifier models had a
4. Conclusions
stable behavior, as can be seen in Fig. 8(a), and the standard deviation
increased with the number of k-folds. Generally, highest values of ac-
In this work a geometrical image descriptor (HOG) together with a
curacy were obtained for the DT classifier. It must be noted that max-
classifier model were used to accurately classify SEM images of worn
imum values of accuracy were obtained at low values of k-fold. The
surfaces exhibiting mild and severe abrasive wear regimes. Three
results show that a cross validation with low k-folds, for a certain HOG
classifier models were statistically tested by means of a cross validation
configuration, which could lead to acquire minimum dispersion of data
process to evaluate their performance. The main contribution of this
and maximum values of accuracy for the three classifier models. This
work was the automatic abrasive wear regime recognition from gra-
would be advantageous in terms of computational cost.
dient characteristics in worn surfaces images.
On the other hand, the results in Fig. 8 allow knowing the effect of
The novel computational strategy was able to index wear severity
decreasing the patch size while keeping the other HOG parameters
from worn surfaces images. The performance of the RaF classifier was
constant. Initially, it can be observed how the best results are reached
outstanding to describe the type of wear obtained in SEM images of
with the RaF classifier but with lower accuracies than those obtained by
worn surfaces, represented with mean values of prediction accuracy
the DT classifier in the previous HOG configuration. Again, at low va-
higher than 80% in most part of the HOG computation. The RaF dis-
lues of k-folds the standard deviation for all models was reduced.
played the most consistent behavior without considering the HOG
However, in this HOG configuration maximum values of accuracy for
configuration, but in some particular HOG configurations was sur-
Gauss and RaF models were acquired at high values of k-folds, i.e., in
passed by the DT classifier. The DT classifier had an outstanding be-
the particular case when much of the images are used to built the
havior in which eventually could predict the type of wear regime from
training model of each classifier
an image with a high accuracy. However, generally this classifier ex-
Some dependencies of classifiers accuracy on the HOG parameters
hibited an irregular performance with some low mean and maximum

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Fig. 8. Results of accuracy in terms of the number of k-folds for the 16-c64-b42 (a) and the 16-c16-b42 configurations.
values of accuracy for some HOG configurations. In conclusion, an
optimization must be carried out to find specific HOG configurations in
which a high accuracy with a low computational cost is obtained for the
DT classifier.
From the viewpoint of future work, the proposed strategy con-
stitutes a basis for an online monitoring and detection system to eval-
uate wear severity of worn surfaces. However, it is necessary to carry
out an analysis of images of worn surfaces of severe and mild abrasive
wear regimes obtained at low magnifications, for example, by means of
a video camera. This would be fundamental to develop a detection
system to have an online automated recognition of abrasive wear re-
gimes in machine parts surfaces. This analysis could be applied also to
the sliding wear of metals, where worn surfaces with severe and mild
wear regimes also display well-defined features [23]. In fact, the
computational strategy here proposed could also be applied in other
types of wear, as long as transitions between different wear regimes can
be observed.
Acknowledgements
The authors greatly acknowledge the financial support offered by
the Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS) through the project VIE-
2303.
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Wear 426–427 (2019) 1702–1711
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